Niels Bjerre-Poulsen

The Heritage Foundation: A Second-Generation Think Tank

On 3 October 1983, the Heritage foundation celebrated its tenth anniversary and the opening of a new

The Road to Mount Rushmore: The Conservative Commemoration Crusade for Ronald Reagan

9.5 million headquarters on Capitol Hill. By the time President Ronald Reagan had taken the podium and described the celebration as “an extraordinary moment, not only in the history of Heritage Foundation, but…in the intellectual history of the west,” it was probably clear to most of the 1,300 guests that the foundation had come a long way in its ten years of existence.

“Here, We See the Future”: The Obama Administration’s Pivot to Asia

The struggle over the political legacy of Ronald Reagan is as intense now as it was when he left the White House in 1989. In fact, two different, though clearly related, struggles are taking place. One mostly takes place in academic circles and concerns Reagan’s rightful place in the annals of American history. The other takes place in the political arena and concerns his place in the public imagination and the American heritage.1

Right face : organizing the American conservative movement 1945-65

Possibly the most obvious candidate for inclusion in any list of strategic innovations during the Obama era, the post-2010 shift to Asia was a rare example of an American administration publicly announcing a change of direction. Far from being a mere rhetorical effort to move beyond the War on Terror as the integrating concept behind US foreign policy, the pivot represented real change. It built on developments started under Obama’s presidential predecessor, on trends in post-Cold War American internationalism and on long-standing historical “Pacific first” strands within debates over US foreign engagement. In the later Obama years, the “pivot” sometimes seemed to be losing momentum due to a host of factors, ranging from funding crises to the simple persistence of chronic insecurity in the Middle East. Yet, the pivot—a recasting of American military, diplomatic and economic priorities designed as a response to changing global conditions—represented an authentic change of direction.